[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Psymon

Thanks, Harry, I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels that way!

I'm still thinking that the nbsp way that I first suggested would be the best way to go -- no offense to Turtle for all his efforts, I do genuinely appreciate that, and those were some intriguing ideas, too.

Perusing some of the other Shakespeare plays, from what I've seen it would appear that none of the creators of them have made any effort to do that, i.e. "indent split lines" (as you accurately described it better than I did). I'm surprised about that, that nobody else ever bothered to at least do even a lousy job of it -- ha ha.
<SNIP>

I guess that's somewhat similar to what I'd like to do with one, maybe three, Shakespeare plays -- just do a nice edition of them, one that's worthy of a writer of his stature, something that's enjoyable to read for the typography of it, and not only the beauty of its words.

We had a client that had done his screenplay in FinalDraft. (FWIW: from that day forward, I've never been willing to take another FD client.)

FD, in its infinite wisdom, has "shared dialogue" like this in columns, essentially, in the middle of the page. Worse, the client had to have the text offset 5 spaces from the left edge (margin, kinda) of the speaker's name. Right, with me so far? Top line (row) would be the two speakers; beneath, next row, would be their respective dialogue lines, and not ONLY did the first line of dialogue have to be indented 5 spaces (eh...) from the left-most-edge of the character's name, but then the line-wrapped stuff had to indent, AGAIN (a hanging indent), from the first line/row. Two levels of indent, beneath the two "pillars/columns" that were the Character names.

We ended up doing it ALL--all the shared dialogue--in tables. There simply wasn't ANY other way, that we found (bear in mind, kiddles, not only was this 4-5 years ago, but we had to do them for MOBI, too) that remotely worked.

If you try to use NBSPs for that much indentation, your stuff will go right off the edge of the screen, in smaller devices. That's what we saw, anyway. If it doesn't--if that breaks--it will break in wholly unpredictable spots. (Somewhat reminiscent of using PRE or CODE to put around code samples, something I was looking at just yesterday...watch those just run right off the edge of the screen.)

IIRC, we put the speaker and dialogue in different rows; we used margins and padding for the cells, ALONG with hanging indents (negative indents) for the wrapped dialogue lines.

I'd never be willing to undertake it again, because it was a giant PITA and so was the client. Not without 5x the money, anyhow. I realize that's irrelevant to this discussion, but it seriously left me with a bad taste for anything remotely approaching it.

Spoiler:

The "play" was one of those creepy things where someone tried to capitalize on the death of a well-known individual, just because he and his wife HAPPENED to be in the same place as the famous person was at the time of his/her death. The whole thing was pitched as some "secret mystery of..." claptrap. Utterly repugnant. I was always amazed that he never realized that his "characters" were repulsive, repellant, graspy people. GOSH, what a surprise that it didn't zoom to the top of the Bestseller lists!

I've performed Shakespeare, and to the best of my recollection, no play reproduction I've seen used the shared-line mechanism. Granted, it's been <mumble> years, which puts it shortly after the end of the US Civil War, when I did that, but...still. I can recall no copy I've seen that reproduced it that faithfully.

I have to say,@Turtle, I don't think I recall text-transform working in everything???

Anyway: tables work, if that helps. As well as anything else.

Hitch